My Current Views on Matchmaking (opinions)

Games Other Halo
1

I could do an entire section on Campaign, but I’ll limit it to specifically Matchmaking.

When I first started playing Reach I would play practically anything and I loved it. Yes I used armor lock, but I didn’t always hold it down for 7 seconds. Instead I used it for the EMP blast. I would play 90% of the playlists and enjoy all of them. I enjoyed the Vanilla game very much for two reasons:

  1. It’s Halo
    fairly obvious. I’ve loved every Halo game that’s been released (fps). With each new installment I’ve found a new thing I love about the series. Halo CE for its core gameplay and audio, 2 for its competitive side, 3 for the insane custom games, Forge, Theater, ODST for firefight and the point of view from someone who isn’t a super-soldier, and Reach for the gameplay choices(how I play the game)

  2. It’s different
    I don’t enjoy playing $60 for the exact same game with a few modifications. With Reach and the addition of AA’s, I was able to change my style of gameplay and see what I enjoy playing as more. For a few months I loved tricking people with Hologram, charging into battle with Sprint, raining death from above with Jetpack, assisting teammates with the Drop Shield, wrecking enemy vehicles with Armor Lock, hiding from the enemy with Active Camo, find the better angle to shoot or get out of the way of a Sniper with Evade. I find it fun to be able to see what other players like to play as and exploit their weakness with what I have at my disposal. AA’s give the change Halo needed to multiplayer otherwise we’d be seeing a Halo 3 remake.

Post TU:
I love the TU, but I also greatly love the Vanilla. With less bloom I was able to enjoy more fast-paced gameplay in my DMR duels and rack up kills faster. With what I love about the Vanilla, is that some trigger-happy fool didn’t stand much of a chance compared to someone with a calm and collected mind who knows when to shoot and when to dodge or weave. I find both to be incredibly enjoyable. I really don’t see why people are hating on Reach. If you believe Halo 3 is better than go play 3 instead of Reach. Reach is a different game and that’s not a bad thing. Bungie and 343 have done their best to try and find the best of both worlds. Reach’s steady population of around 60-80k players shows that people still enjoy playing the game so don’t say that nobody loves TU/Vanilla as everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Yes the population isn’t as high as Call of Duty, but remember the type of game Call of Duty is. Their own community is split between MW2/MW3 such as how we are with 3/Reach or Vanilla/TU.

Final thoughts: Reach’s matchmaking is great and always have been. Sure the lag-switching and host dropping is annoying as hell, but that will improve over-time and I am eager to see Halo 4’s take on the problem.

EG Fuzzy Nugget

2

The matchmaking for Halo Reach was really poor under Bungie who thumbed the nose at obvious problems but 343i have been significantly better but still lacking in my opinion.

Since it took so long for both camps to realise the problems I don’t have much faith for Halo 4. I’m expecting to see BTB maps with non-primary starts and frequent quitting by disgruntled players who are tired of lack of skill/team balancing and poor maps that favour one team over the other.

If there is one aspect that is painfully obvious with Halo 4 it’s that maps have gone from areas that facilitate fluid and dynamic gameplay in Halo CE/2 to spaces that just look pretty and are over-complicated to the point of making gameplay slow and tedious much like Halo Reach.

Less is more and when you add so many variables that gameplay is unpredictable to the point of being random you end up with bad gameplay and at the end of the day we’re here to play a game not sit around looking at the pretty environments.

It also looks like Halo 4 will have the most fractured matchmaking to date with Infinity, Classic and possibly MLG all having different settings and maps that will distribute the population so thinly that players from more remote areas like Australia will be hard pressed to get into a match that isn’t on a high latency international host with subpar gameplay.

Considering how small the populations are in the Anniversary hoppers and the outcry over zero/85% bloom in hindsight maybe 343i were better off not wasting the resources on said gametypes because at the end of the day they only affect bloom when there are so many other aspects of the game that are deeply flawed and can’t be addressed by a TU.

If Halo 4 is using the same lousy p2p I don’t see how it can improve on Reach, it’s not like Halo 4 will be able to tell when someone who has host is going to fire up p2p/other app and cause huge lag or fix people’s terrible connections that pull host constantly.

If anything Halo Reach has a perchant for electing terrible hosts with only the huge detection times making the game tolerable. If there are 15 people from the same country and one international player the international player should not pull host and give everyone else high latency, sub optimal gameplay.